News from the Time Was Antiques family of webstores. We have been in business since 1988 first with an antiques bricks-and-mortar and online since 2001 and exclusively online since 2003. Cheers!

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Trooping The Colours For Queen's Official Birthday

Today, June 16th marked the last of the major royal duties for Queen Elizabeth II before the London Olympics begin in July. She also announced her semi annual Birthday Honours List ehich includes Kenneth Branagh and Kate Winslet.

Although the Queen's actual birthday is in April, her official birthday is always celebrated in June...nicer weather usually. The birthday main feature is the Trooping Of The Colour ceremony at Horse Guards Parade in London where the queen is greeted and is reviewed by Her Majesty.

This photo of from 1982. The Queen is sidesaddle, which is how she always rode for the ceremony. The year before, someone shot at her along the Mall, but she is a spectacular horsewoman and brought Burmese, her horse, under control within seconds to the admiration of the crowd. There will be archived news videos of the event if you are interested. Now the queen, at 86, watched from the grandstand. This year Prince Philip was recovered enough to join her.

Most of the guardsmen you see are Coldstream Guards, the regiment my husband was a member of. He remembers that at the Trooping of the Colour someone almost always fainted due to locked knees. If it was hot, which it sometimes is, there were more that went down...and were subsequently disciplined with a boring job for a bit & teased by the others. In the 1970s, the bearskin hat weighed in at 8-10 pounds. The framework is now much more lightweight and weighs in at 5-6 pounds. I found this photo of an example:

The family enjoyed the carriage ride back to Buckingham Palace after the ceremony. Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge rode with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, as both William and his father Charles were on horseback.

The family then gathered on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for a wave and a fly by.

5 comments:

I actually laughed out loud of that pic of the downed man.....I remember on July 4, 1976 for all the Bi-Centennial celebrations it was one of the hottest summers in history and I was in high school marching band as we were forced to wear our wool uniforms and wool big hats like that - and I think 6 kids went down.

I was always glad all I had to march with was my little piccolo! and I only weighed 90 pounds, which helped keep me cooler.

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About Me

My Brit husband and myself maintain several webstores of antiques and collectibles. We used to own a bricks-and-mortar antiques shop named Time Was but closed it to move to Oregon several years ago and continue the web business that had equaled the B&M at that point. We love what we do!
We have now relocated to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state across the Strait of Juan De Fuca from Victoria, BC Canada. I LOVE those ferries!